(Future) Jersey City Madwoman Writes an Open Letter to Republicans

After looking at about 9 apartments, we found one. close to my train, good deal on parking, good-sized kitchen, cheaper than my rent now. Everybody's happy. And the moving process starts a month from today ... time to start cleaning and packing, find a mover and philosophise some more about furniture!

If you have been paying attention to the news the last couple of days, you heard that all around the country, groups of angry white men protested wasteful government spending and raising the taxes of people much richer than they are by shoving their testicles in the face of the president.

Oh wait, they weren't actually "teabagging" the White House? Maybe irony isn't dead after all.

Dear crazed right-wing reactionaries and their moderate Republican bretheren:
You know this "real America" you love to talk about? We're, on the whole, rational people. We know you're mad as hell and can't take it anymore, but silly publicity stunts do not win over anyone who doesn't already agree with you. Please stop arguing over whether Obama is a socialist or a fascist and offer a reasonable, well thought-out alternative — not a budget with no numbers on it or a fetching graphic representation of what a trillion dollars with it (though we'd advise that you present your catchy new idea in sound-bite form). See: Newt Gingrich's Contract With America. See also: Cindy Sheehan. Need I say more?



I had grand aspirations to go to bed early tonight, but sleep is so not happening right now. Earlier I happened to stumble onto MIT's OpenCourseWare, where you can read lecture notes from classes throughout MIT for free. So if you happen to have a lingering curiosity about, say, urban planning or the principles of pharmacology, that's the place to be.

President Obama!

There's nothing to be said about the joyousness of Barack Hussein Obama's resounding thwomp of John McCain that has not already been said by every journalist and pundit and blogger on earth (yes, on earth, not just in America. Foreigners are ecstatic that we finally pulled our heads out of our collective ass and voted for the smart guy for once.) But a few things come to mind:

1. Every time something goes wrong, I think of the fact that Barack Obama will soon be president and my mood gets a little better.

2. I think it's time for me to take a little siesta from politics. At least until Inauguration Day.

3. That point aside, I have a very important question for you all. When you think of the fact that after eight long, dark years, Obama made it to the White House, and you think of the future, what song comes to mind? I'm making a CD chronicling the Bush presidency, and I need something really good to end it with. I know you guys are not big commenters, but please enlighten me if you have a suggestion. Thoughts on other songs that bring to mind other key moments in the Bush presidency are welcome as well.

4. Obama represents a lot of things to a lot of people. He comes into the presidency after several months of promising everything up to the receding of the of the oceans, and is about to step up to govern a giant clusterfuck. I hope he doesn't disappoint us too much.

Happy Thoughts from the McCain Campaign

"Crystal meth. Me, personally, that’s how I’m going to do it.”

McCain adviser, speechwriter and biographer Mark Salter, on how he was going to cope with the last day of the campaign.

(Via Gawker.)

Election Day Buzz ... Buzz ... Buzzzzzzz

Babeland is giving out free vibrators to people who vote.

But if you're not into the kinds of things that are illegal in Alabama, you can also get a scoop of ben & Jerry's ice cream or a cup of Starbucks coffee for voting (or even just saying you voted.)

Signs I've been following this election too closely

The other night I had a dream that I was trying to vote. I wasn't sure if my registration had gone through, so they told me I should just cast my ballot and if there was a problem, they'd just arrest me.

To be fair, though, it's not totally a random dream since I sent my registration really close to the deadline and still need to check and see if it went through. New Jersey (and New York, for that matter) have no same-day voter registration and therefore are not as cool as wisconsin.

Sarah Palin Haiku!

Check it out. Contribute. Link's in the sidebar.

Wow. That's all I have to say.

I try to keep politics out of this blog because in the journalism industry, partisan rants on personal politics are frowned upon. But partisan-ness aside*, have you seen the latest McCain ad? Has the campaign lost its mind? Obama as The One? Moses parting the Red Sea? Are you serious?

This is one for the Willie Horton and Harold Ford hall of fame.



*Find me an equally beyond-the-pale Obama ad and I'll be glad to call it out.

Things I didn't know when I lived in Harlem

Governor Paterson has an apartment about 3 blocks from where I used to live. Sen. Chuck Rangel does too. Actually, he has four of them. In the same building. All rent stabilized. One gets used as an office, which you're not supposed to do in a rent-stabilized apartment. Interesting.

Dear Hillary Clinton, Please Stop

Every time Hillary Clinton says something mind-bogglingly offensive, vindictive and wrong, I think there's no way she could possibly top it. But then somehow she does.

But I don't know how it's possible to get any worse than what she said a few days ago, which was basically that she should stay in the race because, hey, Barack Obama might get assassinated. Mind you, Obama has gotten death threats and already has his own Secret Service detail.

At this point, I doubt there is much more damage Hillary can do to the party since she's clearly flipped out (well, maybe there is, I'm surprised it has gotten this bad in the first place). But according to Slate's Hillary Deathwatch (For the candidate who has NOT faced death threats and does NOT need her own Secret Service detail), the mathematical chances of her winning stand at about 0.7 percent. So Hillary, for your own future political good, please do yourself a favor, cut your losses and get out of this race.

I could go on, but Keith Olbermann says it all (literally, he does — this clip goes on for about 9 minutes.)

Political Ringtones!

So you just can't get enough soundbites of the presidential candidates? Do you light up every time you hear Hillary Clinton laugh? Get giddy when John McCain berates his questioners? Well now, courtesy of Slate, you can download some of your favorite snippets as ringtones. And it's free, apparently. They don't support Verizon or I'd be all over that, purely out of morbid curiosity.

I heart Jay Smooth

"A politician is just like a plumber. When you need someone to take care of your plumbing, you get a plumber. When you need someone to take care of politics, you get a politician. Both do a service that we really need them to do, but if you watch too closely when they do their jobs, you get grossed out, because they have greasy, dirty jobs. ... We do need to be real about what this job is and remember that we're not hiring a saint. We're hiring the nation's new plumber." —Jay Smooth

I know I've linked to him before, but seriously, Jay Smooth is my hero. Brilliantly snarky people are a dime a dozen, but precious few are those who can be brilliantly snarky in such an un-hostile way. He almost makes me want to take up video blogging. Almost.

Edit: whenever I take random multi-week-long hiatuses (hiati?) from this blog, keep this in mind.

Famous people at my work!

Today Governor Paterson was in the lobby of the Times building, so some co-workers and I went down to gawk and take cell phone pictures. He was surrounded by a bunch of reporters, quietly answering questions, and like most famous people (such as Russ Feingold), he is much shorter than you'd expect seeing him on TV. As a co-worker pointed out, you wouldn't think the governor of New York would be a short, quiet guy.

Image stolen shamelessly from my co-worker kenneth, a much more adept cell phone photog than I am.

Get Some.

My city has its own brand of condoms. Does yours?


I'm too lazy to look but I'm sure the condoms were a Mayor Bloomberg idea (doesn't seem like something Giuliani would have been into). He's all about public health initiatives (farmers market stands in poor neighborhoods like mine, calorie counts on fast-food menus, $7 cigarettes ...) I don't follow city politics enough to make an informed judgement, but how did Mike Bloomberg ever convince people he was a Republican? To me he seems almost european-style socialist. Mind you, he still gives TONS of money to the GOP, so go figure. Maybe it's just that he's so obscenely rich that he can do whatever he wants.

From what I understand, he does do a fair bit of pleading and cajoling and bullying to get what he wants, and the NYC government is not exactly a squeaky-clean organization so I'd take them all with a grain of salt. But I'll give Bloomberg the benefit of the doubt, because, at least as far as I know, he's not cashing out big time on everyone else's economic suffering.

Update: Spitz Quits!

I'm glad Eliot Spitzer decided to be a grown-up, admit his mistake and get out of office so as not to totally disrupt the state government when he most likely goes to trial for transporting a prostitute across state lines and/or money laundering.

I think a decent number of Democrats will forgive him in the end, after they get over their disappointment. Even if he gets convicted and disbarred, he'll end up writing a book or getting some plush consulting or lobbying job down the line. Also, his lieutenant governor David Paterson is pretty well-respected on all sides, not to mention that he'll become New York's first black governor and the first legally blind governor anywhere. Ultimately, it will all be OK. Except, probably, for Mrs. Spitzer.

That being said, I would enjoy nothing more than to see Bush get busted in a sting on a prostitution ring, preferably a sting that involved wiretapping (oh the irony). Sure, he may be able to reinvent executive privilege, openly support torture and oppose health care for poor children, tell the American people 935 flat-out lies on the subject of the Iraq war alone (none of them under oath, sadly), but you'd best believe that if he got busted Spitzer-style, his ass would be impeached faster than you could say "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

"Mr. Clean" gets dirty — and pays $5,500 an hour for it

Gov. Eliot "Ness" Spitzer, who after fighting corruption on Wall Street as an AG graduated to the cesspool that is Albany with a promise to clean it up, was forced to publicly apologize today after a months-long IRS investigation revealed that he had been visiting prostitutes.

You can bet that the investment-broker types downtown are drinking themselves silly right now in celebration. You can read an entire tome of Times metro section coverage (or check out any other major paper, political blog, 24-hour news network or highly vocal street person, for that matter). You can read the Times editorial in which you can almost feel the palpable anger. You can think that while, yes, he broke the law and betrayed his wife and flouted his anti-corruption ideals, maybe people are making a little too big a deal about the whole situation (I'm leaning toward this option.)

But really, all you need to do is watch the video of Silda Spitzer, standing next to her cheating husband as he goes down in a flaming ball of hypocrisy.

EDIT: I'm still trying to wrap my mind around this. The mere time that it takes to say "five thousand, five hundred dollar-an-hour prostitute" would cost you about $20 with such a practitioner. And if Eliot Spitzer really wanted to cheat on his wife, I'm sure he could have found someone who would have happily complied, without risking a decade's worth of his public reputation. So I take it back. Legal and ethical considerations aside, Eliot Spitzer is too big of an idiot to be running a state. Kick the bum out.

And Dick Cheney Said, "Let There Be Light!"

Happy (belated) Daylight Savings Time everyone!

Do take a few seconds to contemplate:
a. the fact that our dark overlord has the power to rearrange the clock for two weeks out of the year (OK, so Congress has to agree to it. But back when this was passed that was rarely if ever a problem).

b. that this is the only context in which you will ever see the words "Dick Cheney" and "sunlight" occur in the same sentence.

Not that I'm complaining. Not at all. I'm all about sunlight, especially when there's more of it at a time of day when I'm awake to appreciate it.

I probably would have forgotten to set my clocks ahead if it had not been for a homeless woman on the train. After she finished telling us how if we didn't give her money her daughter would have to go hungry that night, she reminded us all to reset our clocks or we would be late for church.

I gave her a dollar.

Ugh.

If you are ever at a New York deli, never, ever eat anything containing breaded chicken or (especially) slices thereof. Because I promise you it is not chicken. More like greasy chicken-flavored rubber that will fill you with loathing upon consumption. I have had this experience in at least 3 or 4 delis that were otherwise at least tolerable.

Moving on ... I love how Wisconsin is, yet again, a battleground state. It trips the hell out of me to see Appleton and Oshkosh and Madison datelined in the New York Times, and even more so, to see my alma mater get a mention. (On that note, this fine publication is also doggedly following the campaign season in Blugold country).

I know that the primary system is designed for the maximium benefit of special-interest groups, and it does drag on for an excruciatingly long period of time. But it does have the side effect of forcing politicians to go to electoral pip-squeak states like Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and at least pretend to listen to their concerns. And since there was no coronation after Super Tuesday, the pandering continues. As Lauren Fox of Shorewood, Wis., puts it, "having zoomed from ignored to adored in one day, we might as well put on tons of sparkly eye shadow and enjoy ourselves, because no one will remember our name in the morning."

Of course, being that it's Wisconsin they'll be back to pander some more before the general election. I already miss living in a purple state, at least for now. But I've always had a love-hate attitude toward politics. It's the ultimate reality show, in that it has pretty much the same ratio of reality to utter ridiculousness as most reality shows. But follow it too closely and you'll start to lose brain cells and possibly your lunch.

But to end on a positive note, I the best story I edited today (well, besides the Wisconsin one, which was from the same series) was about the caucuses in small-town Maine. I think Jennifer Finney Boylan has a brilliant take on the Democratic race:

Toward the end of the event, though, someone asked, So what was it like, to grow up as the daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton?

Well, she said, one day, when she was 6 and living in the governor’s mansion in Arkansas, Chelsea decided she’d like to have a coconut. So the Clintons went out and got one. When they got it home, though, the first family faced the traditional problem when it comes to coconuts: how do you open one up?

Chelsea allowed as how her father and she had gone outside, and thrown the coconut again and again onto the hard asphalt of the governor’s mansion’s driveway, hoping to make a dent. But the coconut, alas, refused to yield.

Finally, Hillary came outside with a hammer.

The point being, Chelsea said, that her mother knows how to solve problems.

In the 2004 election, voters repeatedly said that they’d rather have a beer with George W. Bush than with John Kerry. This election, it seems as if the question for Democrats is this: Whom would you call if you really, really needed to open a coconut? Hillary Clinton, with the Hammer of Experience? Or Barack Obama, with the Machetes of Bipartisanship and Change?